Tag Archives | Legends

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Graceland, Beale Street, Wolfchase Galleria… and Voodoo Village

This one is for Matt Staggs.

When you live in the Memphis area eventually you hear about Voodoo Village. Located on the southwest edge of the city at the end of Mary Angela Rd., the odd location has even had a local jazz band adopt its name.

Voodoo Village does have an address, but when looked for, it is difficult to find. Street signs have been removed, the road’s name has been changed, and the streets are overgrown on either side by small crowded trees that lend to the feeling of anxiety as one approaches the area.… Read the rest

Hunting for an elusive sasquatch mask revered by a British Columbia First Nation has been a 16-year journey for James Leon, taking him through London, Boston, New York and Ottawa.

In the end, all it took was a question to the lady sitting next to him at a Vancouver event that led him to his nation’s Sasq’ets mask that vanished 75 years ago.

Leon was at a repatriation event for another First Nations artifact held by the Vancouver Museum when he asked the lady sitting beside him if she knew of the ape-like mask partially covered in bear fur.

“Her eyes lit up and she said ‘We were just looking at that mask the other day.’ And they were gracious enough to go get it for me,” he said with a chuckle.

Mysterious Universe notes that a string of news stories around the turn of the twentieth century reported archaeological discoveries of hidden subterranean habitats and strangely large human remains:

The most famous of these reports appeared in the April 5, 1909 edition of the Arizona Gazette, entitled “Explorations in Grand Canyon.” Explorer G.E. Kinkaid discovered a huge underground “citadel” while rafting on the Colorado River.

Exploring a tunnel that stretched “nearly a mile underground,” Kinkaid found tablets carved with some type of hieroglyphics, and home to a stone statue he described as resembling Buddha. Mummies, all wrapped in a dark fabric, were supposedly more than nine-feet-tall.

The New York Times reported a nine-foot-tall skeleton of a man discovered in a mound near Maple Creek, Wisconsin, in December 1897. The Times also carried the story “Strange Skeletons Found” near Lake Delevan, Wisconsin, in its May 4, 1912 issue. But an April 9, 1885 story entitled: “Missouri’s buried city: A strange discovery in a coalmine near Moberly,” revealed a find that predated the supposed citadel in the Grand Canyon by 24 years.

The first ever found remnant of a sunstone, a crystal which legend says was behind the Vikings’ incredible feats of oceanic navigation? Via CBS News:

A rough, whitish block recovered from an Elizabethan shipwreck may be a sunstone, the fabled crystal believed to have helped Vikings and other medieval seafarers navigate the high seas, researchers say.

In a paper published earlier this week, a Franco-British group argued that the Alderney Crystal – a chunk of Icelandic calcite found amid a 16th century wreck at the bottom of the English Channel – worked as a kind of solar compass, allowing sailors to determine the position of the sun even when it was hidden by heavy cloud or fog, or below the horizon.

Icelandic legend appears to refers to such a crystal [but] few other medieval references to sunstones have been found, and no such crystals have ever been recovered from Viking tombs or ships.

Your plans for next Christmas vacation? How does cryptozoology-themed family fun on a remote Russian mountain sound? Via TwoCrowsParanormal:

Sunny Siberia is adding a new attraction: a theme park devoted to the legendary Yeti. Hoping to cash in on interest in the search for the beast, officials have dedicated a portion of land and launched plans to construct a park centered on the Yeti. Initial plans for the park include a hotel and a themed children’s playground, all built at the Sheregesh ski resort resting in the Shoria Mountain area. The region claims to have a high number of Yeti sightings.

The brainchild behind the park, Sheregesh adminstrator Igor Idimeshev, says that the people of Shoria refer to the creatures as “Big Men” and that everyone in the region is aware of their existence. Believing it unlucky to speak too much about the encounters, the Big Men are only mentioned in conversation briefly.

Regardless of whether or not this actually happened, it would be great to attempt to device a 2013-appropriate version. io9 writes:

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was supposedly the orchestrator of a cruel joke. One night, bored and idly toying with wicked thoughts, he decided to send a note to five of his friends. The note would be delivered anonymously. It would have no signature, and would contain no information. It would only say, “We are discovered. Flee!”

At his next dinner party, his social circle was abuzz with the sudden, and total, disappearance of one of the people he sent the notes to. The person was never heard from again.

But the story didn’t start or end with him. Edgar Allan Poe also was said to have done such a thing. He might even be said to be the better author to pair with the story, since he had more of a devilish sense of humor.

This theory may seem far-fetched but explains all; he is garbed in red and white to match the toadstool mushroom. Mother Nature Network reveals:

According to one theory, the story of Santa and his flying reindeer can be traced to an unlikely source: hallucinogenic or “magic” mushrooms. “Santa is a modern counterpart of a shaman, who consumed mind-altering plants and fungi to commune with the spirit world,” said John Rush, an anthropologist and instructor at Sierra College in Rocklin, Calif.

According to the theory, the legend of Santa derives from shamans in the Siberian and Arctic regions who dropped into locals’ teepeelike homes with a bag full of hallucinatory mushrooms as presents in late December, Rush said.

“As the story goes, up until a few hundred years ago these practicing shamans or priests connected to the older traditions would collect Amanita muscaria (the Holy Mushroom), dry them, and then give them as gifts on the winter solstice,” Rush told LiveScience.

The harsh Germanic Santa Claus equivalent known as Krampus has seen his celebrity rise in recent years, but he’s not Northern Europe’s only the only psychologically scarring Christmas figure. Switzerland’s black-cloaked Schmutzli, also known as “the Whipping Father,” arrives each December 25th to beat and abduct children. Swissinfo says:

Known as Schmutzli in the German part of the country and Père Fouettard (from “whip”) in French, Samichlaus’s alter ego usually carries a broom of twigs for administering punishment to children.

Kurt Lussi, curator at Lucerne’s History Museum, says that the St. Nicholas custom in Switzerland became interwoven with a festival of masks dating back to pre-Christian times. Schmutzli, he says, was a symbol of the evil spirits which these ancient festivals sought to drive out with a combination of noise and light.

He gives the example of an illustration from 1486 that depicts a demon who abducts children. “This child-stealing motif returns again in Schmutzli,” he said.

Atlas Obscura travels to Nevada’s Humboldt Museum and hears what is purported to be a legend of the Paiute tribe concerning a race of warlike, cave-dwelling, red-haired giants who were slain by fire and arrow.

Local legends passed down by the Paiute Indians tell of a race of giants who were exterminated by the tribe. It is said this was done by trapping the giants in a cave, shooting arrows at them, and then starting a large fire at the mouth of the cave. When the Lovelock Cave was later mined, many giant skeletons and artifacts were found in the area; there was also a large quantity of arrowheads found in the cave. Many of the artifacts were lost in a fire, but some of the skulls and artifacts are located at this museum.

The Popobawa is a fairly recent manifestation reported in Zanzibar and Tanzania. The creature is a demon who appears as a normal human by day, and a one-eyed, bat-winged monster at night. The Popobawa attacks and sodomizes both men and women in the dark of night. Reports of attacks come every few years, with a large number in 1995 attributed to mass hysteria.

The Adze is a vampire in the legends of the Ewe people of Ghana and Togo. It takes the form of a firefly, but if you capture one, it will revert to human appearance. In the insect form, the adze will suck your blood while you sleep and spread disease, which is a possible explanation for malarial outbreaks.